Film archivist Alex Cherian is overseeing a project to digitize and make available to campus users hundreds of hours of archival film and video from the SF Bay Area TV Archive. Established in 1982 by curator Helene Whitson, the SF Bay Area TV archive is a unique moving image collection that chronicles sixty landmark years of social history and cultural revolution in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Footage currently available online includes a 30 minute documentary on the life of Willie Brown, former mayor of San Francisco and Speaker of the House in California; clips of the American Indian occupation of Alcatraz; Woody Allen shooting Take the Money and Run on location in San Francisco; an interview with Janis Joplin and Big Brother, which includes a short live performance; and coverage of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in Sacramento just after the Delano strike and more.

SF State users can view these clips in DIVA, the Digital Information Virtual Archive, by clicking on the thumbnails above. A project of Academic Computing at SF State, DIVA is a web-based tool for storing, sharing, collaborating over, and contextualizing files and other content.

In addition to viewing clips from the Archive online, students and faculty can also use footage from the Bay Area TV Archive in their non-commercial video projects, usually free of charge. For more information, see the the SF Bay Area TV Archive web pages.